Black Veiled Mourners, Bygone Age
by ncfan
Summary: It was the end of an era. They were possibly the only ones left alive to remember. Two people who were at once enemies and friends meet after long, scarring years, unable to deny that they have both changed, watching the sun set on their era.


I own nothing. Absolutely. Nothing.

* * *

Dragonflies zipped through the dusk-laden streets of the sleepy town, disregarding the enveloping muggy layer blanketing the town. The pleasant little hamlet seemed so distant and remote from the violent madness that engulfed the land outside it. It was like entering a different world.

Shizune stared up at the rose pink sky, the wistful remnants of what five years ago might have been termed a smile ghosting her face, before fading into nothing again. Smiling required an inordinate amount of energy, energy she didn't possess. There was also to consider that she no longer felt the driving _motivation_ needed to smile.

As she moved through the town, children were at play, not noticing her. No one paid her any heed. It was as though she was a ghost or an insubstantial shadow, something people thought would go away if it were ignored. And there was good reason for people to pretend not to notice her, though Shizune doubted that any would recognize her for who she was. This sad, scrawny woman five or six years shy of middle age, though no one in that town seemed to know, was a living shadow of a different time, of the age that had spawned the most devastating war ever to grip the continent, the war whose marks were still felt to that day in the form of destructive fighting that would break out constantly like a cankerous sore.

As ever, Shizune kept her head down and made eye contact with no one as she walked, for fear that someone from that distant nightmare age might remember her face, the heavy, faded carpet bag filled with everything she had left in the world providing a comforting weight, something familiar in a world that had become a stranger to her, a lifeboat in a tossing sea.

A sweet, aching smell filled her nostril with it's wafting, delicious scent. Dumplings. She stopped abruptly in her tracks, stiff-backed. They smelled just like the dumplings in Konoha. Just like them. For a moment, one torturous moment, she could have been home.

But the moment passed, as all flashes of nostalgia must, and Shizune knew that she wasn't home. She was in a humid little village flanked by sparse forests to the south and marshy plains from all other sides.

The med nin stopped and sighed, feeling the discomfited call of her stomach. She'd been on her feet since dawn, not stopping for meal or rest, a habit she'd established years ago; when Shizune stopped somewhere for the night to rest, she was going to have to heal the calluses on her feet that had reopened and blistered sometime during the morning, while it had still been raining… More to the point, walking from before dawn to after dusk without ever so much as stopping to work out the cramps in her legs always took a toll. Shizune was, as she was at the end of every long day, exhausted and hungry.

There was also the financial issue to consider. It wouldn't be long before she was going to have to find work somewhere for a few weeks, just so she would have enough money to ride on for the next few following months. But for now, Shizune decided she was willing to indulge herself, just for once. What could it hurt?

As soon as the traveler stepped foot in the bustling restaurant, artificial lighting close to non-existent (they probably turned on the artificial lights after dark, she reasoned), she knew she was out of place. Shizune's dull brown traveling cloak, left open at the front, and washed-out clothing (her clothes might have been blue at some point, she could hardly remember, but it hardly mattered anymore as they were worn gray, beginning to fray at the hems, and pitifully threadbare at the knees and elbows, all from overuse) provided a sharp contrast with the vibrant reds and blues of the other patrons. Shizune felt for all the world like a drab little forest bird in a company of scintillating peacocks.

The proprietor, however, didn't notice or else he was a very good actor. Even if a customer came in looking like a beggar, a vagabond or both, as long as she had money to spend on his food, he didn't care _what_ she looked like. "What'll it be, miss?" he enquired cheerfully.

"Those dumplings smell really good," Shizune confessed, brushing a small bit of black hair out of her eyes. "How much do they cost?"

"What do you want to drink with that?" That was never a good sign. He was stalling for time, trying to make her forget her inquiries about the cost.

"Water, please. And how much would that cost, please? I don't have a great deal of money on me."

He gave her a slightly dismissive look that seemed to say, _I can tell._ Shizune felt herself beginning to bristle, before pushing the impulse down. If she raised hell in the restaurant, then it was a safe bet (_Tsunade-sama would have a fit if she could hear me talking about a "safe bet"_) that she wasn't going to be able to eat there. It was also assured that she would be detained by whatever pitiful excuse for a law enforcement agency this town possessed.

He told her. Shizune clamped her mouth shut to keep her lower jaw from losing all function. _That much, in such a little town_? She felt caught in a fishing net of indecision. In her experience, dumplings tended to be among the cheaper items on a menu in any given restaurant or stand, and long gone were the days when Shizune had the steady income to support such an expensive meal. _It'll completely wipe me out. I have to leave._

"I'll pay for hers." A man's voice came from behind her, not quite cheerful, but close enough to give a semblance of it. Shizune whirled around, her hand going almost instinctively to the pouch she kept her senbon needles in; the apparatus she kept on her arm had been destroyed years ago.

That voice… It was achingly familiar. The voice of an enemy…and a friend. It couldn't be. But it was. Now, she _was_ gaping.

"That is, if you'll let me, of course." Kabuto smiled.

* * *

They chose a booth at a window, away from the other customers. Flocks of white-winged sea birds flew up from marshy estuaries with brackish water that stretched on beyond the horizon. Water reflecting deep crimson red and blinding tawny gold splashed, sparkling like stars early in the sky.

Dressed all in somber black, Kabuto looked fit to attend a funeral; Shizune wondered if this was habitual for him now, if was in some strange sort of mourning still for his late master. As he had sat down, Shizune noted with a dull pang the thin silver band gleaming on his left hand. He'd sat down beside her, with Shizune closer to the window. While she would have preferred for him not to be sitting quite so close to her, at least he didn't try to sit across from her; if he had, she would have had to look at him the whole evening.

The years appeared to have treated Kabuto about the same way they had her. Not too cruelly, not too kindly. He still had a distinctly boyish look about his face; he still had wide eyes that seemed bigger thanks to thick, round glasses. That disinterested charm (mostly false, but Shizune knew that at least a small portion of the charm was genuine and unforced) was still there, if not with the same intensity. The signs of aging, however, however minor, were glaring. A few fine lines around the eyes, lines induced by stress, and a definitely drawn face made the signs hit home.

Shizune cursed silently. She'd never expected to see him again. At best, she figured he'd be the single occupant of an unmarked grave in a potter's field, buried and forgotten.

But why on earth did she expect to find him unchanged? It had been some thirteen, maybe even fourteen years since she had last laid eyes on him, in the middle of a battle.

Kabuto seemed to pick up on her thoughts. "I'm amazed you're so comfortable sitting next to me," he remarked. His voice would have been completely offhand and casual, if it were not for the barely discernable tensing of the muscles in his arms. "You remember our last _meeting_?"

"How could I forget?" Shizune retorted. Her left hand went to the outline of a scar on her stomach, a scar that had almost totally receded back into her skin. "I still have the scar," she said more softly.

Kabuto twitched uncomfortably in the seat. Shizune wondered if he'd even noticed he'd done it, or if this was just a habitual, involuntary reaction meant to garner sympathy.

This was how it had always been between them. Every conversation, every meeting. Filled with awkward silences, looking to and away. Licking dry lips and fidgeting uncomfortably. Nothing to talk about, yet everything in the world to talk about. Trying to savor the silence, yet wanting to speak, to say something, _anything_.

Shizune thought about their strange relationship with the same astringent bitterness in her throat and on her tongue as there had always been. Always enemies. But in different circumstances, they could have been friends. _And maybe…_ _That_ thought made her fists clench to the point that chipped fingernails dug into flesh.

In that final battle that had devastated Konoha, when their masters had finally had it out once and for all, in a pause in the bloodshed and slaughter, he'd looked up from the butchering of a Leaf shinobi and said to her_ "Never in this life, I suppose. Oh, well."_

Both Tsunade and Orochimaru had fallen in that battle. Kabuto had taken the opportunity afterward to vanish off the face of the earth; this was the first time she'd seen him since. The only sign she'd had that he had survived the bloodbath at all was the discovery of a note tacked to the inside of her bedroom door, tacked by a kunai.

"_Unless we meet again, never in this life, Shizune."_ It had been all too easy to recognize his small, slightly untidy script.

Though the Sannin were all dead, the war went on. Naruto had made a good Hokage. For all of the two years in which he reigned.

In a sort of mirror image of Tsunade and Orochimaru, Naruto and the Uchiha had had their final battle, ironically in the Valley of the End. The person who was trying to save Konoha and the traitor trying to bring it to its knees, ultimately they destroyed each other, as all knew that they eventually would.

It was after that, with the final assault on Konoha before enemies left it more than half-destroyed, that Shizune had been forced to flee.

In the end, when the dust settled, only Kumo and Suna were left standing, and until recently, Suna had been hanging for dear life by a few fragile spider web threads, ready to evaporate in the desert heat. The Kazekage, now past the fifteenth year of his reign, emerged as a practical, level-headed ruler who could ride his village out through almost any crisis, it seemed.

And now, everything was different. And yet the same.

"What are you doing now?" It was a desperate attempt on the kunoichi's part to break the silence that threatened to swallow them whole and leave them incapable of speech or thought.

Kabuto replied readily, clearly feeling the same need to break the boundaries of lack of sound. "I'm a field medic. God knows there's plenty of work to be had out in the field," he muttered under his breath. "I work at the local hospital."

This made her raise her eyebrows a little bit. She could barely believe this lapse of carefulness on Kabuto's part. Working in a public place, in a profession he had always been associated with? Shizune wondered if the words "Hunter nin" meant anything to him.

As always, he seemed to be reading her thoughts. "It's perfectly safe. _Shizune_, I have discovered something. That age, the age of the Akatsuki (though not of the jinchūriki), the Sannin… It's all over. You and I—" here he turned straight to her to look at her, and his dark eyes were earnest and somewhat weary "—you and I may be the only people left alive from Konoha to remember that age.

"We are forgotten, you and I. The memories of our names, our deeds, of what sides we fought on, they have been swallowed up and blotted out by the names and memories of our masters. And they, too, are fading.

"There's been so much fighting since, and I think there will be for a long time, that fifty years from now, no one will know who Tsunade-sama or Orochimaru-sama even were." He tipped back his head to take a draught from his drink. "Let me assure you, no one knows who we are already.

"That age is dead, our masters are dead, and Shizune, we may as well have died with them. At best, we are black-veiled mourners standing before a bier."

Shizune momentarily considered sniffing his drink while he wasn't looking.

She clenched her fists again. Shizune felt the ache of unshed tears sore her throat. Her teeth clenched the way she had after Ton-ton, her nin pig, had died nearly ten years ago. As it had then, guilty nausea rose in her throat, sick and sweet. She couldn't believe she'd been hungry half an hour ago.

Kabuto, ever the observant med nin, clearly noticed her pain and anger. "Shizune?" A sad, unsure voice, utterly devoid of the glib almost-arrogance it had once contained, reached her ears. Sensitive fingertips probed the top of her hand where it rested on the table, uncertain of whether to comfort or to just leave her alone.

The way Shizune ripped her hand off of the table almost certainly convinced Kabuto that he should have just left well enough alone.

But before she really knew what she was doing, she had thrown her arms around his neck. Kabuto, she could guess, was surprised by that sudden movement, especially considering what had just happened; his eyes were probably wide and round as they were when something threw him for a loop.

It was an act of contrition. He had to know that. That had to be the only reason he was now returning the embrace.

His arms around her back were cold and taut but strangely comforting, his head resting next to hers, almost touching, but not quite. She could hear him draw in a deep, rattling, broken breath. Even this close, they were trying not to touch and trying to break the wall of ice between them, all at the same time. But Shizune was almost sure it wouldn't work, just as it had never worked before. Physical contact burned and hurt, for both of them, but was comforting and familiar, something warm to cling to.

Eventually, they had to break away. Kabuto's hand lingered on her shoulder, tensing and tightening before finally slipping away slowly. His face was pale and confused, almost oddly ashamed, before he turned away, sliding down low in his seat. He watched his hands shake with an air of what seemed like childlike wonder.

She blinked and stared at his face for a moment, feeling the remnants of old fondness return. Their eyes met; hers embarrassed, his unsure and perplexed. He almost immediately looked away, trying to hide the fact that his face was coloring ever so slightly, despite all attempts to keep the blood down. Maybe encroaching age was impairing his ability to hide emotions and physical responses.

Shizune started to stare out the window again. It was better than having to look at another old ghost, one that was painfully real and close. The flash of the silver ring caught the corner of her eye like a hook. Defiantly, her head turned further away. _Well, when it comes to each other, we still can't do _anything _right. We're continuing to hurt each other, to wound and torment each other, without meaning to. That much hasn't changed._

"Thirty-seven," Kabuto muttered beside her, his voice dull and drained. "I always figured I'd be knocked off before I hit twenty-five. I never thought I'd live to see thirty-seven."

This provoked a nod of the head from the woman sitting next to him. _I was amazed when I lived to thirty. Now, I never thought I'd live to see thirty-nine, either._ For shinobi, they were practically ancient.

Before Shizune was able to stop the words from tumbling out of her mouth, they were said. "What have you been doing…since…" This was how it always was with them, jumping from topic to topic, avoiding and evading what really needed to be said between them.

Mercifully, Kabuto picked up where she left off. "Well, after Orochimaru-sama 'passed', Otogakure didn't seem a very attractive place to stay. Oto fell into complete chaos, and chaos isn't something I like very much. So I left."

Shizune wondered that he could speak of his late master so lightly. Even after so many years, thoughts of Tsunade still left a gaping hole in her heart. Then again, Kabuto had always been a master of deception, so that unconcerned barrier could simply be a veneer. Shizune had always had a hard time telling when he was lying.

But no matter. While she wasn't going to press him for information, while she was content to wait until he touched upon the matter that was making Shizune's mind scream angrily. A flash of silver caught her eye again.

"When I wasn't fighting off hunter nin, I was heading towards Iwa."

"Iwa?" Shizune interjected. "Why?"

Kabuto smiled briefly, a tight smile before he lifted his glass to his lips again. "If you will recall, as an infant I was found at Kikyo Pass. The names not very apt, though; I don't think anything could grow there, let alone bellflowers. Anyway, at the battle of Kikyo Pass, the combatants the Leaf were fighting were Rock nin. So that means that any biological family I have is in Iwa.

"I know the name of my biological mother from the birth record my father found on her. So I at least had a place to start.

"She had no living family, as far as I could tell, but eventually I found someone who knew her well. She was a Hunter nin. The irony was overwhelming," he muttered. "Her second partner in Iwa's ANBU Black Op.s was still living." The smile on his face grew to one of pleasure and authenticity. "Well, now I have something more of my mother than a headband, six or seven chromosomes and an autopsy photo." He fingered a picture he had suddenly produced from a pocket.

Shizune peered over Kabuto's shoulder to behold the picture he held in his lap. It was well-worn as if with much touching; she wondered if Kabuto or the last owner of the photo was responsible for this.

There were two people in the picture. Her eyes were immediately drawn to the woman. This was clearly Kabuto's mother; apart from more feminine features, a thinner face, and slanted, piercing ice blue eyes, she was Kabuto down to the white hair and glasses. The woman was tall, if Shizune was to judge by the fact that she was very nearly standing on eye level with the man next to her. The woman was turned to the side, and her hair was short enough (not quite reaching her shoulders) and her black shirt was sleeveless, so Shizune could see the tattoo on her upper arm, probably a symbol for Iwa's ANBU; the rest of her arm below the elbow was slightly laced with mostly faded white scars. She wasn't quite smiling, but the look she was giving the camera was one that suggested that she wasn't displeased.

"After that, I wandered for a while, before settling near the coast in the Land of Rivers." Shizune had a feeling that there was much more to Kabuto's trip to Iwa than he was letting on, but he didn't seem too keen on elaborating. "The land was experiencing the aftereffects of war; fighting was still going on—though to be honest, there's still fighting going on. Everywhere."

His voice grew more quiet, more subdued. "I worked as a field medic there, and I married a girl, another medic, who was much younger than myself; her parents were _not_ pleased. She never found out who I was, really, who I had fought for or where I had been concerned to the events of the times. We were married for about two years, before she got hit with the blast of a shrapnel cannon. It took two days."

_Okay, not married, just widowed._ Shizune could have hit herself for the utter ghoulishness of that thought. His voice was flat and lifeless as he detailed that part of his life to her. Either Kabuto was trying to hide insincerity or he, never fond of showing too much emotion, had concocted his monotone as a defense to hide pain and suffering. Maybe. Possibly.

But still, intense, hissed words were being forced out of her mouth. "_Why_?" Shizune hissed, her eyes burning.

Though left unsaid, the words hanging in the air rang in both their ears. _Why her and not me?_

Now, a heightened sense of discomfort could be felt coming off from him. "She…looked like you," Kabuto explained lamely. It was too homely a sentence to be one of his lies. He looked out the window, at the ceiling, the other patrons, anywhere but her eyes, as he always did when he was genuinely ashamed.

Shizune didn't know whether to be flattered or disturbed.

"Did you…love her?" The whole world hinged on the answer; the way her voice shook, one would think the earth was quaking.

"For God's sake, Shizune, when I first saw her I thought she was you!" His voice rose in reluctant but un-resisted pain. "I thought… I thought…" His voice broke off, catching in his throat; Kabuto seemed to be gripped by the same pain that Shizune had felt earlier. His eyes were screwed shut, fists and teeth clenched. Was it her imagination, or was Kabuto actually shaking in the seat?

Shizune grabbed a hold of his shoulder. "Did you love her?" she demanded under her breath.

Kabuto slumped in his seat as if in exhaustion. "I'm not sure," he admitted finally.

It then occurred to Shizune that there was a good chance that he hadn't lied to her at all that night. Not even a "white lie" like where the money was coming from for the meal.

"To be perfectly honest, I'd almost forgotten I wore this." He looked down at the ring, fingering it gently, his face soft. For one moment, Shizune saw a different man, saw what she had been trying to see in him for so long. The thought that he could grow like that for another made her stomach twist like a writhing snake. "It's almost like a part of my skin, now." It was a pathetic attempt to lighten the mood; he'd said the wrong thing.

Shizune too felt like a leech had stolen her energy. That was unusual, for her. "What about…after that?" she asked almost timidly.

He blinked in gratefulness, glad to be off the painful topic. "I headed back to Konoha…or rather," he murmured, "what's left of it. I found my father dying in a hospital from a massive infection. After soundly berating the other med-nins—" his face darkened "—for leaving him alone in a hospital room to die, I took over his treatment. It was actually kind of funny; it took them nearly three days to figure out exactly who I was."

His face grew almost gentle. "Despite the danger I put myself in, I was glad I had come back. My father and I…he was only alive for a couple of weeks after I went back, and he really was in too much pain to talk." Kabuto looked up at her. He looked lost, like a small child trapped in a dark place. She knew it was not pretense. "I told him the whole sordid tale. Sasori, the mind jutsu, everything. He gave an indication that he wanted to know why. After I made sure he had a decent burial, I left.

"The hunter nin started coming after me a little more thickly after that. Though there will never be another Hokage, I think that they think that if they can just bring home the head of one more traitor… Futility, to be sure, but it's futility fueled by hope. The last attempt was three months ago.

"And you?" His voice was strained, falsely cheerful.

"Oh…" Shizune's voice was just as falsely cheerful. "Nothing worth talking about."

_Just that I fled from Konoha with two small children whom I eventually watched be killed because they possessed a kekkei genkai—why, __**why**__ did I have to take them to Kiri?!—but not before I killed some of our attackers. And now I have hunter nin after me too, except they're from Kiri because one of the men I killed was a member of their jonin council, and that's why I can never afford to stop anywhere for more than a few days, because if I do, they will find me… So no, absolutely _nothing_ worth talking about._

"I stayed in a port city in the Land of Wind for a little while." She grinned insincerely. "The tan's long since faded, thought."

"Hmm." The lopsided remnants of a smile formed on Kabuto's face. "You with a tan…That's something I would've liked to see."

"You know, there's always an opening for a med-nin, here. The fighting's thick in the surrounding areas."

Shizune frowned. "Really? This town seems so peaceful."

He snorted. "Peaceful," he spat like it was a dirty word. "Six months ago, this same "peaceful" town was halfway to being burned to the ground by nin from Kumo. I've kept my Leaf headband, but had to get rid of the Sound headband—more from expediency than anything else; if someone were to find a Sound headband among my belongings, the situation could get pretty uncomfortable pretty quick."

Kabuto must have caught the way her face fell when he explained his reasons for getting rid of the headband that proclaimed his loyalty to Orochimaru. "Oh, Shizune." He gave a sharp, barking, humorless laugh. "You look disappointed."

She didn't answer, fidgeting with the frayed material of her sleeve hem. _I just…_ she thought sadly… _I just would have liked to know whose side you're really on._

He continued to go on. "If you need work and a place to stay, like I said, there's always an opening."

Shizune caught the meaning, the words he was too ashamed, too proud to give voice too. _Just don't make me be alone again. I'm so tired of being alone._

"Alright. On one stipulation." She smirked. "If you get drunk off of that—" she pointed to the cup in his hand "—I'm not going _anywhere_ with you."

He smiled. "Shizune. When have you _ever_ known me to be drunk?"

"Well, for most of the time I knew you, you were too young to drink in Fire country."

An understanding had been met. They still weren't sure if they could do anything but hurt each other, but for now, they drew comfort from each other's presence. At any rate, Shizune trusted Kabuto not to try to kill her in her sleep. Now, anyway. He wouldn't drive himself into madness by ridding himself of the last person alive who understood. At least she didn't think she would.

They fell into almost pleasant silence.

Shizune's brief cheer soon evaporated like morning mist. Wearily, she pressed her cheek against the cool glass of the window, staring at the scene outside.

The dazzling gold of a brief halcyon glory was gone; the carmine had become blood. Higher above, funeral veils hung in the sky, moth-eaten holes revealing stars.

_Just two old ghosts afflicted by lives that are broken still… Unable to move on, unable to do anything without hurting each other… Remnants of a bygone age._

* * *

Just so you know, this does _not_ go with my multichapter fic, _The Fourth Great War_. I prefer to think of this as a nightmare scenario springing from the canon.

Oh, on Halloween, if you want to read a Halloween fic, read my oneshot _Remnants._ I make no claim to it being what anyone would call a "masterpiece", but I think it's good for late-night Halloween reading.

As always, read and review. I hope you liked this angsty little oneshot!


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